This dark world: Poetry in the age of AI
Michele Seminara’s dispatches from the twilight zone of Australian suburbia
This is a review of a poetry collection I loved recently. It’s maybe an eight-minute read depending on your relationship with your phone. I’ve never really reviewed poetry before, for what that’s worth, and for extra context I draw heavily on a great conversation I came across with the poet. Thank you to Elle and Tegan for proofreading it.
Also, my review of Marija Peričić’s Foreign Country was published in the Australian Book Review! Read it here (it’s behind a paywall, sorry). I’m really proud and happy that following up on a cold pitch resulted in some momentum for me with such a prestigious publication. My next published piece will be a profile of the Australian author Madeleine Gray in the Summer issue of the State Library of NSW’s Openbook magazine.
In the 1965 French film Alphaville, the thing that breaks the circuits of the artificially intelligent machine controlling the dystopian society of Alphaville is poetry.
In the absurd and diffuse technocracy we must navigate in 2025, I’ve re-discovered this for myself after coming across the Australian poet Michele Seminara’s 2021 collection Suburban Fantasy.
I came across the book in a moment of idleness as I worked a local literary festival, perusing the books for sale. It was a poem called ‘Rapture’ wherein someone who is probably dying contemplates their life — God, to take just one more / bite, and this time savour — which roused me to buy it.
In the Alphaville of my own life, reading through this collection acted as a circuit-breaker for some of the thoughts and moods that have surreptitiously overcome me in recent times. Thoughts like: it’s all hopeless. The machines have won, hate has won, the dogs have won. Moods like: brain-rotted and numbed-out apathy. Suburban Fantasy ended up keeping me company for a while (poetry collections should never be rushed through) and no matter where I was - on a bus, a train, waiting for a date - I found that it always resonated in some way, or I always found a poem that did. It was less reading and more a divining process.
Love in a dark world
Suburban Fantasy muses on many themes through Seminara’s own particular glass darkly. Indeed one of the best lines in the collection, perhaps even the heart of it, is from ‘True Crime’ where the poet muses on what over-consuming true crime podcasts has done to her psyche: “It is a dark world in which we dare love.”
The dark world of Suburban Fantasy encompasses motherhood and mental illness; female subservience, guilt, anger and agency; occasionally politics, something Seminara has been more overtly involved in recently as part of the heterodox creative arts journal she has restarted; and of course the latent violence of suburban life, occluded from view by the fantasy.
The ending of Alphaville suggests that there are high ethical stakes in daring to love. What does it look like, in Seminara’s world, to do that?
A poem ‘remixed’ from Corinthians (and named for it) becomes an unsentimental meditation on the vagaries of love, implicitly contrasted with that much-quoted passage on love from the New Testament. “Love … longs to be known as kindly as it knows.” Yet how often it isn’t. “Love fails. It fails!” the poem declares, to me conjuring up Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better” with a wistful smile.
A remixed poem, Seminara explains in an enlightening conversation on Poets’ Corner, “messes around with another poem to make something new… drawing out a thread, offering another view.” Another view she draws out is from Philip Larkin’s well-known poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. In her remix, called ‘Plot’, Seminara counters the male lens to wonder how “marriage struck then swelled then slowed / the girl displaced inside” the women Larkin conjures up.
“There is a whole secret life of women going on under Larkin’s gaze, or certainly in his poem,” she says to host David Adès in the Poets’ Corner conversation. Women’s secret lives are more or less at the centre of Suburban Fantasy. ‘Ms. Suburbia’ has shades of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman when its subject finds herself “pausing / with lost purpose to pick up / some thing here / and artfully place it there.”
What goes on inside these homes so artfully maintained by women of lost purpose?
Domestic hauntings
In ‘Blood Nature’ a scream rises up from the depth of a house, presumably in the suburbs — very Laura Palmer-coded — irrupting in the dead of the night into a scene both real and dreamed. It’s “an epicentre of anxiety / radiating out to irradiate this world.” This foreboding Francis Bacon-esque poem is itself inspired by an ekphrastic poem written by Edvard Munch around the frame of his famous painting.
When I was a child I often woke up screaming. ‘Blood Nature’ and many others in Suburban Fantasy recalled some of those troubling feelings and impressions around the family home I developed as a girl: like watching from my window as the white-sheeted body of an elderly neighbour got stretchered out of his home by paramedics, their front door left wide open while the medics were inside, the eerie green fish tank light in the foyer I stared at while I waited to see the body. All houses are uncanny like this: more liminal, watery, and haunted at certain times. And containing secrets, doubleness, private hells: “Two storeys, two stories, / the down stairs unrolling like a fiery tongue”, the poet writes in ‘North Facing’.
A remarkable documentary called Witches (dir. Elizabeth Sankey) I recently watched explores the domestic as sometimes containing a great darkness, even evil, whether real or imagined — as well as a powerful tenderness. It posits that how we understand madness and intelligence have to do with how we understand women’s roles in society now and throughout history. Witches and Seminara’s collection share a thesis: there’s a power (or at least a refuge) in articulating, in sharing, in disentangling your experience from those who would try to shape it for you to serve themselves, in resisting the “masters who morph into monsters” (‘North Facing’). There is something witchy about Suburban Fantasy — the ways it testifies to certain truths about female subjectivity and, in this articulation, defies the masters/monsters.
One of my favourite lines in the entire collection is in ‘Truncated’ where the poet describes herself as “baying like a bitch at spectres”. I felt that deeply – the humour of it, the hopeless atavism of it: and the way, in another poem, the poet despairs: “I speak so circumspectly these days / even the dog won’t come!” Indeed, the poems do start to speak to and of each other – I notice how often the word ‘blood’ appears, as if the portrait of the poet the collection crafts is blood-red Rorschach inkblot.
Other motherhood
Quite a few poems in Suburban Fantasy look closely at the difficulties of parenting a troubled child, or parenting in troubled times, perhaps even parenting as a troubled parent. ‘Truncated’ sees a mother contemplating her child’s near-mythic desertion of the vision she has for them, as they “recalibrate their fate”. ‘Facetune’ sees the poet wishing cosmetic airbrushing could “restart / the heart, the mind / unspool the past”. There is a vivid sense of the poet’s grief over the world’s ravages upon a child, while also weighing up their own complicity: “I did damage tonight — / wounded her as vaccine,” she writes in ‘Redact’.
In the Poets’ Corner interview Seminara speaks of motherhood as a metamorphosis, and says that when she had her first child no one had prepared her for the mental changes – including the guilt. “Mothers are naturally guilty-feeling creatures,” she comments. The feeling made her think: “Either I’m the worst mother in the world or they’re lying”. ‘Other Mothers’ explores this sense of wondering what’s really going on for other women. Fathers and husbands as patriarchs menace and trouble the picture too (as in ‘Run Rabbit’ where “the coiled snake / of Father’s anger / sleeps at the base of his spine”), as do their families, but these poems never come across as self-martyring or blame-shifting — just honest, even at times excoriating. In the affecting ‘Borderline’, which to me reads as a recount of a suicide attempt, the poet states decisively: “I got my due.”
“I felt drawn and driven to write but I didn’t have free hands… so poetry became something I could tinker with in my head as I changed nappies and hung out washing and later on when I did have time I could sit down and write,” Seminara says in the Poets’ Corner video. Inevitably this brought to mind my literary heroine Shirley Jackson, who would concoct stories while washing the dishes — sometimes even stories about dishes, toasters, ovens etc. Her mind was always occupied while she completed the domestic drudgery and what she wrote when she put pen to page was dark, too. The Lottery, her 1948 short story about a ritual stoning in modern America, provoked a frenzy of panicked and disapproving letters to The New Yorker when it was published. Jackson’s oeuvre was all about the weird screams that emanated from the suburbs. Seminara in this collection shares with Jackson an impulse to closely document — albeit in a different form — the cruelties and the irruptions, poking at the damaging fantasies, and share a bracing sense of speaking out of turn.
It is (still) risky to write and risky to speak from a position of historical and personal subjugation.
The collection forms a portrait of a woman who found poetry as “an assay into / sovereign space” (‘Her heart seeks’). It occurs to me that poems are a way to tell about life through a glass darkly — or perhaps a strange prism that can convey between people so much more than prose can. Instead of saying: My dog died and I felt it was my fault, a poem like Seminara’s ‘Finis’ can carry the ache and the twisted emotional metaphysics of that guilt and make the reader (certainly this reader) feel more acutely what the poet felt (“dogs teach us not to waste time,” she tells Adès). Like Jackson, Seminara tells it slant. There’s a cleverness and political usefulness to this.
Describing the darkness
It surprised me to learn Seminara is a Buddhist until she said: “we’re very into sitting with our darkness”. Buddhists, she explains on Poets’ Corner, also have rituals around contemplating one’s own death.
“I quite like thinking about death, and what happens after… I don’t know why. That spiritual worldview is the deeper stuff of life. Even deeper than suburban noir, there’s a peace, like diving under a wave,” she says. It reminds me of David Lynch’s well-documented practice of transcendental meditation, and far from making him a zenned-out bore it resulted in masterpieces like Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), which diagnoses (I feel correctly) the spiritual malaise of the modern world — tracing it to the first detonation of the atomic bomb.
Similarly, the meditative deep-diving in Suburban Fantasy brings Seminara back up to the surface, to the suburbs, with ways to reflect on that more everyday reality to help us to see those dark glimmers beneath. “My glistening gut of pearls / will bind your wounds”, she writes in ‘Rope’.
Where does the poetry – the gut of pearls - come from? As the opening poem, ‘North Facing’ offers a sort of poetic theory that offers an architecture for the collection. The poet suggests that poems can be “word-wood” to build a “safe house”, but there’s no neat building with such materials: poems are also a “gash” and the subtle violence of the word doesn’t seem an accident. The collection is a hundred gashes, a form of violence on almost every page.
Adès asks her in the conversation: is writing poetry a bit like articulating and facing damage? Like an exorcism? Seminara thinks and responds: “you can transform and become friends with the darkness.”
I’ve been turning this over in my mind as I think about the function of poetry and art in general. Sufjan Stevens famously (or at least memorably, for me) didn’t experience catharsis in writing his magnificent 2015 album Carrie and Lowell, about the death of his parents. You can become friends with the darkness but darkness will always be frightening — the only catharsis, probably, is death. Adès and Seminara talk about poetry as a refuge in wounding, and I wonder if that more so gets at the value art can have for people even when the ‘real world’ doesn’t offer closure or catharsis for the artist or the reader. I don’t want to get too earnest here but maybe poetry is something that exists because it helps us, somehow, to live.
Return to Alphaville
When Seminara muses on Poets’ Corner about the ways we notice and fail to notice, how we are steeped in 24/7 news feeds and constant distractions to the point where noticing becomes a discipline, it seems she is describing our own Alphaville. Adès responds that “it’s harder and harder to be present. Everyone’s either in the past or the future.” This is a chilling thought, but when I look around in public and see almost everybody’s heads in their devices, it seems equally true that we are living in an endless present.
In Suburban Fantasy and Alphaville alike poetry is a form of resistance to a dehumanising present. There is a Buddhist saying, Seminara says: guard your minds.
Thank you, Mel! It’s an incredible feeling to have your work so deeply read and understood. Long live poetry!